So I wrote this piece…

…for the Friday Times. Sort of put down a few observations regarding Pakistani immigrants in Western Europe, with a focus on Italy. This is part of a larger collection of notes I’ve jotted down about immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America in Western Europe. Hopefully, a simple copy-paste from TFT’s website will retain reasonable formatting on WordPress.

**crosses fingers**
http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta2/tft/article.php?issue=20110624&page=20

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I ask Naseer if we should perhaps sit down to some coffee. The Tuscan evening is unforgiving and chilly. The neon lights of a cafe sing their siren-song for me, from across the piazza. To further convince myself that seeking shelter is best for both of us, I glance quickly at Naseer’s clothes: a woefully inadequate hoodie and a scarf. I muster all the politeness I can, painfully conscious that my Punjabi is rusty from months of disuse. I am doing a delicate balancing act between cosmopolitan etiquette and Lahori street gregariousness, offering to continue our conversation over a coffee.

	Successfully reaching Europe does not mean an escape from poverty

Naseer is taken aback. He mutters that he does not usually drink coffee, then insists that he will still have it. I am furious at myself for not suggesting tea before coffee.

Within minutes, he is regaling me with tales of how effectively he can swindle Europeans once they begin drinking. He describes, for instance, a certain Italian beach party that he found his way into, and how lucrative it was for him. Having seen a lot of couples and noticed that amour was very much in the air, Naseer and other young Pakistani immigrant men descended upon the party with bottles of champagne. Bottles of champagne which were filled with water, and crudely re-sealed.

Within minutes, he is regaling me with tales of how effectively he can swindle Europeans once they begin drinking

“We sold that water and made 20-30 euros off each bottle. They were too drunk to notice that what they were buying was just water, not champagne!” he shouts through hoots of laughter.

But that is what happens on a good day. An exceptionally good day. Otherwise, Naseer may be found at a certain piazza in Florence, selling trinkets and cheap sunglasses. He lives in a small apartment shared with several young Pakistanis. They share a common situation: they left their country and came to Europe illegally, and now find themselves caught between destitution here and poverty back home.

Dystopia and the City: part 1

Note: Yes, you’re very clever indeed, dear reader. The title of this post is inspired by “Sex and the City”. I’m not above watching trashy shows at times. This post is about how I feel, sometimes, on a pensive, lonely evening in Milano. It was written recently, on such an evening, as I sat with my laptop in my lap. My desktop was on my desk, you see, and I have no palmtop for my palm. Anyhow, I digress. The point is that I wrote this post staring out of my window, at the city. My life is not always so pathetic, but hey…everyone has their highs and their lows, no?

I’ve been thinking a lot about urban existence in today’s world, and what it means for an individual. This of course raises, for me at least, the issue of social alienation for the individual living in an urban environment.

The classical Marxian approach is to view alienation of the individual in economic terms: i.e. how they have a subjugated position within the relations of production in a society, and how this results in a lack of control over their existence as social beings. While I accept this as valid, I am particularly fascinated (and disturbed) by other aspects of how an individual is alienated: i.e. the psychological impact of an urban environment on a person. David Harvey touches upon some of these issues brilliantly in his work on  spatial allocation in a city and the social-psychological factors involved there.

In a way, my reading of Harvey’s work on urban areas leads me back to the classical Marxian framework for understanding social alienation. The way I see it, the city is structured in a certain way to facilitate the productive processes of capitalism at any given time, and its spatial arrangement is geared towards reinforcing the relations of production in society.

If you haven’t followed all I’ve said so far, imagine we were looking at the map of a city, with me pointing at various points on the map:

In order to maximize profits, this is how the city has to be laid out. The rich neighbourhoods must be right here, next to the beach, but not too far from the mega shopping mall here, with good roads and easy access to the boulevards here with the fashion-clothing chains. And the cheap apartment blocks must be here, close to the bus routes that lead into the industrial area here, but not too far from the cheap super-markets here, so those plebes can stock up on huge and tasteless vegetables and starchy food and have enough energy for another day of work at the assembly line. And the ghetto must be right here, in this godforsaken part of town, and it must not get anywhere close to the boulevards, and the routes leading out of the rich neighbourhood must not intersect with the narrow lanes here that take you out of the ghetto.

Of course a serious study of urban development is a lot more complex than this, and many more factors come into play.

And who does all this planning? Some of it happens by itself: an urban environment evolves a certain way under commercial pressures. Over time, changing commercial realities lead to a thorough re-structuring of most of today’s large cities.

But of course, there have been instances where a lot of this was done with a “master plan” too. There there have been examples of massive urban re-structuring in many parts of the world. Harvey provides a fascinating study of how this happened in Paris, including a social history of the work carried out by 19th century urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Harvey and others have understood the “renovation” of Paris in the light of capitalist modernity, its social pressures and its imperatives.

The reader will be fascinated to learn that one of the reasons why Haussman was so interested in building wide avenues through Paris was to ensure better policing. Narrow, constricted lanes were the scene of many of the iconic barricades set up by the urban poor of Paris throughout the 19th century during periods of revolutionary turmoil and revolt. Widening the urban routes helped Napoleon III’s regime in “controlling the mob” and allowed for suspicious activities to be observed more easily by state officials.

Dystopia, dear reader, took root the moment modernity came to the city. 🙂
But more on this later…